It has been a month now since I joined the new gym and you may remember I was very excited that it had a pool. I have always loved to swim. I remember going through all the fish-named levels of swimming lessons at summer camp, with that goal of diving off the 3 meter board to reach Shark. I have loved the water my whole life and have always considered myself a good swimmer.
Swimming for exercise instead of fun is a fish of a different color though and I quickly learned that paddling around the ocean is not really exercise. On my first day in the pool I was barely able to do 10 lengths of the pool in 30 minutes (and it is a short pool). I was winded easily and had a hard time coordinating my limbs and my breathing to be more efficient.
A month later I can do 40 lengths in that same 30 minutes and I have mixed up my strokes to work different muscle groups. I can feel improvement to endurance at the cardiac, respiratory and muscle levels and I feel really good.
Swimming works your whole body, especially your core, which I didn't realize is part of what is keeping me from sinking. By changing up strokes I feel it in different muscles, but I never feel it in my joints. In fact, if I do a swimming workout the day after a really tough class or gym workout I find my knees, hips and back (the middle-age trifecta) feel better.
After a few weeks of swimming and making the above discoveries I decided to research swimming as exercise and found this article which told me everything I had already figured out. It made me feel really good about my experience in the pool.
Do you swim for exercise? Any tips? Please share in the comments, thanks!
Fantastic. For a while, there was a gym near here that had a huge pool. I loved it, although it was much harder than I had thought it would be. My favorite time to swim was in the winter at night. There was something sort of comforting about it despite the lung pumping exercise. Enjoy!
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